Astarte Capital Partners teams with niche real asset owners

September 11 2017

Astarte Capital Partners, a co-investment platform for “value-add infrastructure” assets, is about half-way to closing its latest $200 million fund. The manager does not charge typical management fees, preferring to invest alongside its clients.

Stavros Siokos, the firm’s London-based managing partner, said on a regular trip to Australia last week, that Astarte looked to invest in planes, not airports. “We like water, farm land and shipping at the moment,” he said. “Also, luxury retirement houses which are not dependent on subsidies. Our focus for those is London, Barcelona and Switzerland.”

“We like to team up with the niche owners of assets and then institutionalise them. We like things which are demographically driven, such as with increasing populations putting more pressure on food and energy resources.”

Another niche market was billboards in the UK, where only about 5 per cent are digitalised. The new types of advertisements are both digitalised and optimised, where the ad can change according to who is looking at it, thereby increasing the yield enormously, Siokos says.